Tuesday, 23 January 2001

SUNDANCE: DAY FIVE

Remember Miramax boldly proclaiming that they would be highly active in acquisition (a.k.a., "buying a lot of stuff") at Sundance this year? Well, we just got past hump day, and they haven’t bought a thing. And the funny thing is, I can’t blame them. As is often the case, the most obvious choices came to the festival with distribution. The best stuff here seems to be the documentaries and not the dramas. And even the drama that people really like isn’t very commercial. Stuff will be sold, but so far, THE Movie doesn’t exist.

One picture that has sold is Super Troopers, the comedy from Broken Lizard. It sold to Fox Searchlight less than 12 hours after Fox Searchlight’s Peter Rice and his team excused themselves from the Sexy Beast dinner to go to the midnight screening at The Egyptian. Me? I just don’t get it. There was a large contingent of young people in the audience hooting and hollering. But they were hooting and hollering before the movie even began. Super Troopers is essentially a combination of Police Academy and Porky’s, with plenty of pot jokes, near-sex (the one guy we see naked we really don’t want to see naked) and "I’m a bigger moron than you! No, I’m the biggest moron!" kind of humor. About half the audience was laughing. And they were laughing hard.

But remember, Fox Senior did big business with Dude, Where’s My Car?, never screening the film for the press and getting universally apoplectic reviews after papers sent critics in, at full price, for weekend shows. I haven’t seen Dude, but for what couldn’t have been more than a couple of million dollars, Fox Searchlight is landing a movie that will make them big profits when it passes $10 million domestic...and it will do that. So I guess bidness is bidness. But for me, this was not a laugh fest. The guys who made the film seem like really great people. But a fat man covered in powdered sugar and stoned teens and even the great Brian Cox rolling his eyes like one of those rhinestone- encrusted cat clocks with the tail as the pendulum didn’t do the comedy trick for this viewer. I think I laughed out loud once.

Monday morning went a little easier. I started my day, after four hours of sleep, with The Endurance: Shackleton’s Legendary Antarctic Expedition. Now, I don’t know whether I was over-identifying with the film as a metaphor for recent days at roughcut. (Lots of snow, lack of sleep, limited food, shooting our team of dogs to save on supplies... you know, the usual.) But I really enjoyed this film. What makes it truly remarkable is the film footage and still photography that came from the actual expedition. Director George Butler puts the tale together in a clear, crisp form so that every twist in the true-life story seems to add to the impossibility of it all.

Of course, there are few documentarians who hit a home run with me pretty much every time. But Chris Smith is one of them and his new film, Home Movie, is a small wonder. Home Movie tells the story of five different people/couples and their very unique homes, and, by the end, turns out to be a lot more than the comedic version of Architectural Digest. There’s the Gator Guy, the Cat Couple, The Silo-ists, The Gadget Man, and The Woman Who Lives in a Hawaiian Treehouse. Sound interesting? It is. And as always with Chris Smith, it’s very funny and completely human. Lots of us are missing American Movie’s Mark Borchardt up here in the snow, but this group of five has its own unique charms. A must see.

People are threatening to drag me to parties tonight (Monday), so who knows what will happen. But the festival is heading into that comfortable zone, where the movie choices get clearer and the faces get way too familiar. Don’t worry. They say that a blizzard is one the way.